krebscycle

The press and Republicans  kept the 2000 Presidential election  close enough for the Supreme Court to steal it for George W. Bush thanks a great deal to Bill Clinton’s abdication under fire. The Justice Department stopped trying to enforce the voting rights act - facilitating Florida and other states gross vote theft operations. The FBI was basically handed over to the Republicans and spent 2 years devoting enormous resources to investigating Clinton, his allies, and many Democratic politicians on trivial issues - remember the destruction of Henry Cisneros? And from every government agency, there was a flood of inappropriate leaks of information that was or could be made to seem embarrassing for the Administration from empowered GOP sympathizing bureaucrats secure in their untouchable status.

Ken Starr commanded vast resources from the executive branch  to ferret out and publicize any rumor he could find about Clinton’s sex life. (And so the FBI did not have the resources to look at Saudis who were studying how to fly planes, but not land them. )  Grand Jury secrecy, supposedly one of the cornerstones of rule of law, was openly violated thanks to the complicity of the press. And when the press was not assisting Starr’s “elves” to violate Grand Jury secrecy, they were assisting in 24-7 hysteria about Clinton’s penis. That was a great moment when, at a joint Press Conference with the French President in Paris, the US press didn’t even pretend to want to know anything about US relations with  France or national security issues or trade - just about semen stains on the blue dress.  Income inequality, tax fairness, the already visible problems of bank deregulation, racial discrimination, jobs, environment - the Press was bored with all that when they could run with low grade smarm all day. What a glorious moment for the First Amendment. 

The press creation of fake scandals intimidated Clinton and Janet Reno so much that they gave up trying to run the Department of Justice (and FBI). They scared Gore out of running on the Clinton Administration’s successful and popular record. And then they pushed their “serial liar” smear of Gore while covering up Bush’s extremism and racist dog-whistle campaign. Now Bill Keller the former NY Times editor wants to go back to the glory years of Ken Starr when the NY Times went day after day inventing scandals to benefit the GOP.

And now we are being told to support the AP’s sabotage of a US espionage operation directed at AQAP bomb makers? Or even more ridiculous: to support Fox “News” effort to sabotage US foreign policy in Korea and embarrass the Administration.  When there is not a scintilla of evidence that there was any government wrongdoing exposed? And to line up with the Press in their defense of their right to violate any law in an effort to damage a Democratic Administration while treating the GOP with fear and an embarrassing servility? 

Right.

@root_e I don’t care. Govt, any govt, vs freedom of press, there’s only one honest side.

— JeffSharlet (@JeffSharlet) May 15, 2013

And I immediately think about El Mercurio in Chile in 1972 and Radio Rwanda when it was urging its listeners to kill the “cockroaches”. Or perhaps when Rush Limbaugh refers to liberals as cockroaches. To me, the Allende government should have prosecuted El Mercurio editors for treason, bugged their phones, arrested the CIA agents who were paying them, and traced their connections to the military traitors who were planning to overthrow the government. To me Radio Rwanda’s eliminationist rhetoric or Rush Limbaugh’s, for that matter, are not examples of free speech or the operation of the free press. I’m interested in justice and freedom not empty formalism or reflexive libertarianism. The government is not always in the wrong or even a single entity.

What did the AP do? Did they expose government misconduct? No. Did they inform the public of policy issues of great importance? No. Did they practice journalism? No.  Did they express a political opinion? No. What they did, in all probability, was provide a channel for one faction in the bureaucracy to attempt to disrupt the functioning of the elected government. They exposed a US covert operation in Yemen that was spying on people who are manufacturing bombs and trying to send them into the US or onto US airplanes. That’s not an exercise of freedom of speech or press. It would have been irresponsible of the Obama administration to let such sabotage go un-investigated. When the Clinton administration passively allowed Ken Starr to violate grand jury secrecy with the assistance of the media they were not supporting freedom of the press, they were failing to protect democratic government - not to mention the rights of grand jury witnesses. 

As candidate for President in 1968, Richard Nixon sabotaged peace talks. Ronald Reagan’s team likely sabotaged or tried to sabotage Carter’s efforts to get back US hostages before the Presidential election. The far right has spent decades planting loyalists inside the armed forces, the security apparatus, and the bureaucracy. And the far right, the evangelical right in particular, does not believe in democracy, rule of law, constitutional process or any of that stuff. Sharlet’s book The Family is a chilling documentation of the mindset of one right wing faction. And yet …

There are obviously significant parts of the US security bureaucracy that hate the Obama administration. The right wing in Congress is not opposed to the President within the context of a political system in which law and voting determine outcome, but in the context of what they see as a crusade. Former Representative Alan West, without a single complaint from even his “moderate” GOP colleagues said that Obama supporters are “a threat to the gene pool”. The last election cycle saw a lavishly funded campaign to deny the right to vote to African-Americans. Anyone who lives outside of the liberal villages can testify that the level of anger and open threat from the right is high. I take those people seriously.

So here we have a situation where someone inside the government is working with a hostile corporate media operation to sabotage a legitimate, even vital, US national security operation. Attorney General Holder has spent 5 years attempting to clean up the right wing destruction of the Department of Justice, to start enforcing civil rights laws and environmental laws again, to at least remove some of the most noxious right wing ideologues buried in the bureaucracy by the Bush administration, to get rid of the people in  the DOJ who claimed torture was legal, to defend the right to vote against legal and extra-legal intimidation. Faced with a national security violation, a real one - not like the fake ones Bush and Cheney and Nixon invented - the AG goes out of his way to follow both the letter and spirit of existing law by recusing himself from the investigation. A subpoena that is clearly legal within existing law gets phone records. There is not even a hint that AP journalists will face any criminal charges.

And yet, the formalist “left” wants Holder fired - they join the far right which has been demanding his ouster from day one ( and imagine the confirmation hearing for a replacement AG in the Senate as Lindsay Graham defends “liberty”). They even go so far as to echo the bullshit “tyranny” rhetoric that Confederates have used in this country since the 1840s. The civil liberties “left” urges us to “Stand With Rand” as he echoes the paranoid anti-government rhetoric of Dixiecrats.   And then they take it as self-evident that they are principled supporters of liberty and those of us who find their arguments grossly unpersuasive are unprincipled or worse. Well to hell with that. Privilege and naivete are not principled. You want to call for Holder’s resignation? Tell me who is going to defend the Voting Rights Act over the next 3 years first.  And if the voting rights act matters less to you than the sanctity of the AP’s phone records, then - well then we know who you are. And it’s not admirable at all.

The budget of the United States is so bloated with give-aways to the wealthy, subsidies of dirty, obsolete industries, waste and inefficiency that it could be brought into balance rapidly while still increasing both investment in infrastructure and the kind of economic stimulus Keynes showed will boost economies out of recession.

Keynsian stimulus is a simple idea based on the observation that people who are working create wealth - they don’t just move it around.  If the government buys things and pays people to make things or to do other work or just gives unemployed people a living wage, their economic activity can create wealth. The government pays me to get my house insulated, I pay you to do the work, you hire laborers and buy equipment and supplies, your employees buy things from local stores which hire salesclerks, and so on. If this is done well, there is a multiplier  - each dollar of government spending generates multiple dollars of economic activity. And so when the government eventually reduces spending, the economy has a running start and keeps going along. Your home insulating business is chugging along, your employees are consuming goods and producing home improvements and so on. People were not just taking in each other’s laundry, they were building businesses, educating kids, inventing new products, and so on 

Keynes particularly advocated this program during a recession when the economy is in a downward spiral. As businesses fail, their ex-employees and suppliers and bankers all suffer and cut back on their spending which causes more business failures and lower government tax collections and so on. When the Great Depression started, Keynes was not widely respected by economists and politicians. So they tried austerity - the government cut back on spending and the theory was that things would eventually reset themselves. That did not work out so well. The economy got stuck in reverse and got worse and worse until FDR came into office and started spending. Government spending immediately stopped the fall and began revving up the economy. Keynes theory worked, the austerity theory did not.The same thing has happened in our time. The Europeans have tried austerity and are mired in recession, poverty, and increasing social unrest. The US tried stimulus and the economy recovered. There’s not really room for debate: Keynsian stimulus works and austerity hurts the economy. But as with FDR, because of political opposition, the current US government has not been able to spend enough on stimulus to boost the economy into full speed. FDR had to wait until the war started to boost spending high enough, but we do not. In fact, we don’t even have to increase government spending.

If you oversimplify what Keynes argued, you end up only thinking about total government spending. But Keynes never argued that just having the government spend money was stimulative - he argued for government spending that put money in the pockets of consumers and that otherwise increased domestic demand. Keynesian stimulus is government spending with a multiplier, but a lot of government spending has no multiplier. For example, the US government spends $200/gallon to get gasoline to soldiers in Afghanistan. That money does nothing for the US domestic economy - it just increases the debt.  The government spends $7,000,000,000 (seven BILLION) dollars a year to buy crop insurance for mostly big corporate farmers. Suppose the government let farmers buy their own insurance and let insurance companies sell insurance without government welfare,  and took half that money to hire teachers. At $50,000 for teachers (salary plus overhead), we could hire 70,000 teachers and scatter them across the country. Those teachers would rent apartments/buy houses, purchase goods, pay local taxes, save money in local banks, and also - by the way - teach our kids. That is, we could reduce government spending by $3 1/2 billion each year while increasing government stimulus of the economy and investing in the future via education.  Why don’t we do it? Big corporate farm interests have better lobbyists than school teachers. Pure and simple.

Or consider all the tax expenditures in the budget - because someone has to pay for tax breaks.  Bowles-Simpson estimated tax breaks like carried interest exemption that let Mitt Romney pay 15 % tax rates cost the rest of us over $1,000,000,000,000 (one TRILLION dollars) a year.  If that money went into pockets of ordinary people instead of into Caribbean gangster banks, it would create a lot of domestic demand and lift the economy. Same with money budgeted to be spent on the Iraq and Afghan wars or on oil subsidies or to reduce the cost of executive jets or  waste in Medicare or …

The bottom line is we can increase government stimulus of the economy, as Keynes proposed, while reducing total government spending because way too much of the Federal budget is corporate welfare.